Please go back to A Fourth Explanation and reread it before continuing. It has been changed significantly.

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Chapter Seventeen

Virgin Morning

The thing that always fascinated me about the mornings was what amalgamations of emotions they were. Truly an alienist's dream. There was such regret, and a vague sense of violation, and yet at once there was a deep, abiding comfort that hung in one's bones like the warmth of a wintertime fire.

It was not the first time, nor even the second or third. It was sin as routine, or even perhaps as comfort. And it functioned oddly well as such. Gray light came in the window, somehow twisting its way through all of the assurances towards secrecy with which I had blocked the window pane. The stretched, strained light touched my nightshirt almost tenderly, like a lover, tossed as it was on the floor, casually, almost savagely aside.

I was lying stiffly on my side, staring at the wallpaper and the maze of the patterns stamped upon it. It was very cold, even for April, the morning lying in the standing water of that awkward stage between adolescent, bitterly freezing night and adult, sun warmed day. Watson was stretched comfortably out on the opposite side of the bed. He never seemed to wake up cold as I did, with his sweat and his seed dry on my skin and my arms wrapped around me in a vain effort to conserve some of the previous night's heat.

As a child, they promised my mother I would not survive my first month on earth. "He is too small to live." Secretly, my brother told me, he had always thought I was too sad to live, with my small pinched infant face and birdlike shoulder blades sticking out at unnatural angles. I was several weeks prematurely born. Perhaps this explains my perversion. "You must keep him in warm weather, as warm as you can. He is a sickly boy. He will not be an athlete, I'm afraid." They used to talk about me as though I was a hothouse orchid. I believe I have reached six feet in height and whatever physical prowess I possess only through spite.

Uncomfortably hunched over, hands nervously twitching at the sheets, I wished for my nightshirt, but was too naked and cold to rise from the bed and retrieve it. Next to me, Watson shifted in his sleep, stifled by hushed dreams of secret things. Did he know how much of an enigma he could be to me? Now, does he realize it? Oh, I know everything about him. I know the way he stands and what it means about his state of mind. I can follow his thoughts like a tracker on the savannah, I know where he plans to spend his money and where he has been that day. And yet, with all this knowledge and deduction at which I am so skilled, I still know nothing of the silver landscapes of his dreams. What was he dreaming of that morning? Why do I remember it, and what compels me to set it down? These, though, are questions for another time.

Again he moved, creaking the already overtaxed mattress, and I felt the break in the dawn's grey flow that meant he had woken up. I shut my eyes. Perhaps I could feign sleep. He did not need to mock me with his own natural, calm humanity, not when my own was so difficult to grasp.

"Holmes?" He asked thickly, and I will admit to a flash of pride as I realized I was the first person he asked for upon waking. Unable to help it, I opened one eye and turned around to look at him.

"Mmm?" I was such an actor, pretending not to have been awake for hours, shivering and wishing I could have some of his warmth again.

"Oh. Well. Good morning," he said, sitting up. He held the sheets nervously to his chest, as though afraid for me to catch a glimpse of him.

"Mmm," I said again, and grabbed his wrist as tightly as I could. I was not ready to allow the night to pass. Not completely. Not yet.

He did not try to pull his wrist back, either. Oh, it was just as well for him. He could believe that it was mere medical curiosity or sheer wrongly placed compassion. He did not make a sound as I moved him closer to me. A silly charade, really, pretending it was I who tempted him. A very silly charade.

With the gray light still spilling in onto our poor forsaken nightshirts, we lay in what was to become our customary way, with my head just brushing the strong line of his jaw, cheek pressed comfortably against his collarbone. I hummed, only to fill the silent air, snatches of opera and Mendelssohn. One of his hands left the small of my back to cover my mouth. Outside of this room, this bed, he would never have dared even to question my odd whims, but here there were no barriers between us.

His hands traced my face in the silence. Protruding chin, enormous and almost Semitic nose, stubble dusting my throat, a mouth like the slash of a knife. I have always been remarkably ugly, but there is some magnetic force in ugliness.

We were waiting in the gray light for something, or nothing, to happen. It seemed as though we waited for a long time. Things became familiar, and the part of my mind that faintly recognized the bitter repugnancy of our actions was slowly silenced. I knew that the silence would not last, but it was good to have it for just a while. It was good to have those silent mornings. I molded with my hands the muscles of his back, feeling them loosen under my touch.

He was exposed but not afraid. I was afraid but not exposed. All of my emptiness had been filled. I was not fool enough to believe that any of it might last, and yet somehow it did. The gray virgin morning stretched on and on, full of his rough hands and his soft voice and his mouth on the back of my neck.